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What’s better than getting an expert’s opinion on the best ecommerce plugins for WordPress? How about getting the opinions of 10 experts!

That’s what you’ll find here: the combined and consolidated wisdom of 10 top WordPress experts on the best WordPress ecommerce plugins (and which ones to avoid), along with the number of downloads to date, user ratings and additional information. A complete list of references is provided at the end of the post.

Image credit: The Wondrous Design Magazine

As with many things in life, which alternative is “best” largely comes down to: “it depends.” The plugins below provide various levels of functionality, customizability, price, popularity and other features. Which is best for you depends on your application, the type of product(s) you are selling, the geographic area in which you sell, your level of sophistication, your budget and other factors.

The three sets of plugins below, compiled from reviews by top WordPress experts, are divided into (mostly) free, premium, and possibly obsolete.

Popular, (Mostly) Free WordPress eCommerce Plugins

To start, here are 26 (mostly) free ecommerce plugs available through WordPress.org, plus 1o more (generally fee-based) scripts and plugins available from third-party sites. These are sorted in descending order of popularity (number of total downloads to date), though keep in mind—just as in high school, the most popular isn’t always the best.

“No Worpress E-Commerce line-up would be complete without WP e-Commerce from GetShopped.org as this was the forerunner in the WordPress E-Commerce stakes. Alas for us therein lies the problem – the plugin has become overstretched, buggy and whilst we have found that the support offered has improved overall it still feels lacking. To focus on the best bits the plugin offers an interesting slant on shopping with their premium ‘DropShop Drag & Drop Cart Widget’, but in reality the actual usefulness of the plugin is limited as users tend to find it easy enough to simply add an item to their basket. The plugin however does cover Digital Downloads and also you can easily monetize your NextGen Gallery with another premium ‘add-on’. On the negatives WP e-Commerce mainly lends itself to WP e-Commerce themes and this makes setup and indeed updates a real pain. We’ve found that fixing a bug on one set of templates is then totally overridden and replaced by a set of new bug on update – for a developer that is pretty tiresome.” – Slick Media

“This is a fully feature-rich plugin that is free of cost. This adds a shopping cart to your blog rather easily and quickly…The only downside is that this plugin requires frequent maintenance and this can become a really cumbersome task.” – All Blogging Tips

Despite its popularity, this plugin earned more “1” ratings than “5” ratings.

“Utilize eShop if you want customers to create profiles to sign up on your site to purchase your products and services. It also allows you to view basic statistics and download your sales data for your convenience. Also enjoy multiple gateways like PayPal, WebtoPay, iDeal, and other popular portals.” – Shareaholic

“eShop (free) has most of the features that put it in direct competition with the top three plugins…Yet, it is completely free.” – WinkPress

Unless you need special features that this plugin doesn’t include, it is possibly the best of the bunch.

“WooCommerce (free) is the first ecommerce plugin on this list because since its recent introduction, it has quickly gained popularity and community support. It is based off of Jigoshop (which is definitely worth checking out also). WooCommerce is free, and it’s backed by plenty of premium extensions and themes.” – WinkPress

“The WooCommerce plugin is built by the WooThemes company. With WooCommerce plugin you can transform any WordPress-powered website into a powerful eCommerce store and sell anything beautifully. It allows to keep an eye at incoming sales and reviews, stock levels, general store performance and statistics from the WordPress dashboard. An integration of successful themes with WooCommerce can give a huge impact to any business giving the ability to grow sales on the web.” – TemplateMonster Blog

With its 4.0 rating, another legitimate contender for the “best” title.

“Simple PayPal Shopping Cart by Tips and Tricks HQ is the most downloaded and highest rated lightweight shopping cart plugin on WordPress.org. I like the way it works. It outsources location-based shipping and tax calculations to PayPal. It is simple to use, yet highly customizable.” – WinkPress

“The WordPress Simple shopping cart can be easily integrated to any existing site or Facebook profile in minutes. (It’s) very easy to use.” – Durham Web Designer

“Set up shop in minutes with physical and downloadable products or even services. Jigoshop provides you with the features necessary to set up an eCommerce web site lickety-split. With the option to create a multitude of product types and apply detailed attributes customers can easily refine your catalog, ensuring they find what they’re looking for in just a couple of clicks.” – DynamicWP

“Jigoshop is a WordPress eCommerce plugin that is developed by professionals with years of experience delivering online shops for global brands. After installation, with all that features available, you can adjust your future online shop within several minutes. With Jigoshop plugin you can create multiple product types, apply detailed attributes making sure that your customers will find any product with just a couple of clicks. Inside the dashboard you get sortable sales graphs, incoming order/review notifications together with stats on your stores performance.” – TemplateMonster Blog

“Actually better to say shopping cart plugin which have lots of features along with free themes. Some unique features of this plugin: Manual Payment Options for users (via checks/or through money orders), PayPal Payments Standard, PayPal Payments Pro…Show as featured : Special Products, Gifts, Coupons Pack added.” – BLOGVKP

Though it was featured in only one expert review, the fact that this plugin has the highest overall rating (4.9) based on input from more than 100 users makes it worth checking out.

“Ecwid is free ecommerce plugin for WordPress. It is a fully featured shopping card system that is pretty easy to install and set up. You can set this plugin with few key strokes and clicks. Ecwid is also customizable so you can have it the way you want it.” – HostingTag

“It is always said that the best things in this world are priceless. So is true for this plugin because it is free to use. It is a shopping cart system which is easy to install and even easier to. It is fully customizable so you can decide how it looks on your site.The drawback is that this plugin uses Ajax, so SEO value of website is affected. Moreover the users who do not have JavaScript enabled will not be able to use it.” – All Blogging Tips

“Quick Shop is a popular lightweight cart plugin. It only works with PayPal, but it provides more flexibility than usually expected from a plugin in its category. It allows the merchant to set the currency and even provide free shipping for orders exceeding a certain amount.” – WinkPress

“This is useful with the themes that have a sidebar installed as this plugins gives a sidebar shopping cart option in your cart. The plugin requires PHP 5 and you need to make your own CSS. The plugin is really customizable though.” – All Blogging Tips

“Welcart is a program made in Japan, which assists you to build e-commerce system on WordPress. It has not only simple shopping cart function but also other functions necessary to run your store, such as “Order management function” and “membership function”. Welcart corresponds to various types of WordPress template. 8 widgets included in the program will help your blog to become an online shop. Note that the community page is in Japanese.” – DynamicWP

“wpStoreCart is a free, open source, and full featured e-commerce platform built atop of WordPress. It is easy to use, lightweight, heavily supported and constantly updated with new features.” – DynamicWP

“wpStoreCart (free) has most of the features that you’d need in a shopping cart, but I found its features to fall a little short of meeting customer requirements.” – WinkPress

“We’ll cut to the chase and say that MarketPress is probably the best WordPress E-Commerce plugin for a WordPress Multisite Configuration. Like all wpmudev plugins, MarketPress is fully WordPress MS compatible. This is a killer feature as it means that when installed on WordPress Multisite all products, product tags, and product categories from across the network are indexed globally. They are then displayed on your main site/blog marketplace pages or with a set of powerful global widgets or short codes. This means that MarketPress is powerful enough to enable you to create an entire Shopping Network like Etsy or Shopify within a WordPress framework.” – Slick Media

“MarketPress is the easiest to use, best designed and most powerful ecommerce / shopping cart plugin available for WordPress today.” – DynamicWP

“The Professional WordPress eCommerce Plugin. Use it as shopping cart, catalog or framework. You can extend its functionality with plugins and themes to customize your store exactly in same way that you do with WordPress. It is compatible with many existing plugins in the WordPress repository.” – DynamicWP

“Use this plugin if your site is dedicated to offering several products and services. The plugin’s features will make shipping both physical and digital products easy, and you can experience the Amazon S3 integration for all of your digital products. You can also manage orders effectively and use custom fields for products. Collect recurring payments for subscriptions, memberships, and payment plans. Memberships behind a pay wall. Sell access to content on your website. Protect any blog post or page so that it is only available to paying members. Setup teasers where a part of the page is public but the rest of the page is only visible to paying members. Create membership feature levels (i.e. basic and premium memberships) and fine tune the access to your content. Show or hide content based on the logged in members feature level.” – Shareaholic

“Cart66 is a WordPress e-commerce plugin that gained huge popularity among theme designers. Cart66 plugin works with any WP theme, that’s why it’s easy to implement a shopping cart on any WordPress website. You simply create your product and place it, via shortcode, on any page or post. Theme designers are taking Cart66 even further by incorporating features like custom post types and a rating system. Cart66 comes equipped with a powerful admin panel. Set your currency, choose which countries you want to sell to, charge tax by zip code ranges or states, manage orders, view sales reports, track your inventory and start selling.” – TemplateMonster Blog

Note the depending on your needs, you may need to the paid version ($89) of this plugin.

“YAK stands for “Yet Another Kart,” but in my opinion, this shopping cart really stands out from the rest. This free WordPress plugin is one of my favorite shopping cart solutions because it allows the user to create products from either posts or pages and also includes a basic XML feed. You will enjoy the configurable shipping address feature and your customers will love the plugin’s order tracker. ” – Shareaholic

“If you already have an online retail presence, and want to create a blog to make sure your customers are constantly updated about the latest products and services offered by you, then this YAK plugin is an unbeatable option for you. This is an open-source shopping plugin which allows categorization of products and services, and gives the users a pool of multiple payment options.” – All Blogging Tips

Though the reviewers liked it, note that this plugin, like WP e-Commerce, received more “1” ratings than “5” ratings from users.

“WordPress Ultra Simple Paypal Shopping Cart allows you to add an ‘Add to Cart’ button on any posts or pages. It also allows you to add/display the shopping cart on any post or page or sidebar easily. The shopping cart shows the user what they currently have in the cart and allows them to remove the items. You can also add a form between the cart validation and the paypal submit if you choose a 3 step process.” – DynamicWP

“This plugin is acclaimed among many WordPress users as the best Auction plugin there is, so a little investment for auctioning items on your site via this plugin is probably worth it. Enjoy 3 bidding engines, registered only users and reserve price features as well as options for Pro and Pro Plus plugin.” – Shareaholic

“You can use this plugin if you want to provide privileges to access exclusive content of your blog, only to the registered users. It will restrict the guests from seeing the hidden content. It is basically designed to sell stuff which cannot be shown to all people , like digital arts or intellectual property. Instead of showing the content to the unregistered users, they are shown with the actions they need to take (such as registering with you via a minimal payment) to view that content. Google’s bot can index that hidden content though, so users can search for it but they cannot see and access it without registration. This plugin uses Pay Pal – IPN (Instant Payment Notification) protocol so that the payment and content delivery processes are quick and automatic.” – All Blogging Tips

“Shippingeasy is a powerful online platform which gets integrated with your WP eCommerce store completely. You get complete set of custom features from tracking to setting up shipment prizes. Actually its like an addon to wp-ecommerce plugin. This plugin utilizes the api of Shipping easy.” – BLOGVKP

Premium (Mostly) Fee-Based Third-Party WordPress eCommerce Plugins

These are listed alphabetically, as ratings and download information was not available in all cases.

“This script allows you to have a quick & easy payment terminal for your clients to pay with major credit cards (Visa, Master Card, American Express, Discover) on your WORDPRESS website without leaving it. Installation and configuration of the script takes less than 5 minutes (however you do need to have SSL and one of 4 merchant accounts (PayPal, OptimalPayments, Moneris US or Moneris Canada, Authorize.net).” – DynamicWP

GetShopped (Discontinued)

Price: Free
Included in: 1 of 10 reviews

What the reviewers had to say:

“GetShopped (free) is one of the earliest shopping cart plugins for WordPress. It used to be a little shaky, but its more recent versions have seen tremendous improvements. While official support for the plugin is lacking, its community is huge.” – WinkPress

“Market Theme ($55) is a very user-friendly shopping cart solution for WordPress. While its features are limited, it is very reliable and easy to use. It’s very affordable at $55 only and it is backed by a solid satisfaction guarantee.” – WinkPress

“PayPal File Download for WordPress is the easiest way to sell digital content to your visitors. Easily sell and automatically deliver e-books, PDFs, ZIPs, and any other kind of file to your customers—with built in IPN , email delivery, and download expiry.” – DynamicWP

“With PayPal being ubiquitous for online shopping, splurge a little on this plugin and enjoy features that allow you to view all of your transactions, sort your transactions list, and also gives you and the purchaser automatic notifications throughout the purchasing process.” – Shareaholic

“This is an excellent plugin but comes with a price tag of 55$. What you will be getting is a single license to this plugin, some extra plugins and modules, and priority for support. This plugin is specially designed for big firms which can use this as a solution to all their online shopping problems.” – All Blogging Tips

“ShopperPress ($79) has plenty of shopping cart options and features and plenty of appearance customization features. Yet, it is very easy to use thanks to the setup wizard and the extensive online documentation. It also includes more than 20 child themes. For its features, it is fairly priced at $79 only.” – WinkPress

Templatic eCommerce (Discontinued)

Price: $65
Included in: 1 of 10 reviews

What the reviewers had to say:

“Templatic Ecommerce ($65) is a shopping cart solution by Templatic. It’s a collection of different themes that are all powered by the same shopping cart code. Each ecommerce theme from Templatic costs $65. Buy one of these if you’ve fallen in love with the designs — as there’s nothing special in the functionality..” – WinkPress

“I love Themeforest’s WPdeposit for any site that needs a deposit system for advertisements, subscriptions and the like. Aside from offering PayPal, Authorize.net and iDeal as gateways, manual bank payment is also an option. The plugin also comes with a full developer guide that can be used to create and customize a module for your site.” – Shareaholic

Free but Possibly Obsolete Plugins

These last five plugins haven’t been updated in a while, so they may or may not still be supported. Caveat emptor.

“This is another free WP plugin for selling online. This was originally created for the artists to sell their art work online through their own blogs and websites. One can seamlessly integrate his/her Pay Pal account with this plugin and leave the rest on this plugin. This plugin does real time sales update, so as soon as your product is sold it will be excluded from your catalogue. You need not worry about your product being sold twice.” – All Blogging Tips

“FatFreeCart works with PayPal and Google Checkout. I think it’s very underrated. It supports product variations, taxes, and shipping & handling fees. It also has a nice ajax-powered shopping cart view. While the plugin is made by e-junkie, it works completely independently of the e-junkie service.” – WinkPress

“This plugin is one every eCommerce site should use. Using this widget, you can showcase featured shopping offers in the sidebar of your website. Use the “live-shopping” widget to create custom badges, buttons and banners that pull in your products and draw attentions, clicks and hopefully new sales!” – Shareaholic

“This provides a button which can easily be embedded into blogs and websites to accept payments or even request donations. This can be helpful if your blog is shared across the internet via RSS because it allows every blog entry to act as its very own mini store. MiniCart will implement a mini-shopping-cart. The users will be able to buy one item at a time. You can embed the items into posts. This can also be used as a donation plugin.” – All Blogging Tips

“LBak Google Checkout, as the name implies, only works with Google Checkout. It is very simple, yet very usable. It is for merchants who deal in U.S. dollars and charge a fixed shipping rate per product. The plugin also supports product variations. The original author of this plugin no longer maintains it.” – WinkPress

Whew! There you have it–three dozen WordPress e-commerce plugin options, from free to premium, to meet virtually any need. And now to acknowledge the experts…